1. Field of the Invention
The invention is related to hygiene training devices for children, and more specifically to a child-sized sink and vanity which is useful in an existing bathroom or other remote location without formal plumbing connections.
2. Description of Related Art
Teaching children proper hygiene is a part of parenting that begins early in a child's life. Often a child who is capable of learning how to wash her hands is too small even to reach the counter top of the conventional sink let alone reach the faucet and turn the handles of the sink. Typically, one must provide a stool upon which the child may stand or, if close enough to the sink, the toilet seat may serve as a stool for the child. However, it is not optimally safe for a child to be climbing up and down on stools or toilet seats in the bathroom, as the floor is typically tile or stone and the surfaces of the stool, seat, or floor may easily become wet and slippery. As such, the child can easily fall off any of these surfaces. Additionally, it may be difficult for caregivers or babysitters to lift a child to adult sink level.
Previous attempts to enable children to use sinks have been overly complicated. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,182,822 to Cyr et al. describes a child's sink with a cabinet housing a water supply that is manually pumped from a below-located reservoir up to the spigot for use in washing. The user (a child) must pump up and down on a vertical handle to force water to flow. This teaches little in terms of the use of most sinks, as, today, water flow is not controlled in adult sinks by pumping of the faucet handles. Also, it is unclear how a child may be pumping the water with one or both hands while trying to properly wash said hands. At any rate, this apparatus very poorly simulates how a real sink works.
Other portable sinks such as those described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,881,404 to Knight and U.S. Pat. No. 6,427,259 to Cawthon are flawed in that they require an actual plumbing connection for a water source and a drain to function, thereby limiting ease of portability. Additionally, they are not designed for children. One hygiene training system that is designed for children is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,037,871 to Babylon, but it requires an existing fixed toilet, sink, and the above-mentioned undesirable stool to stand upon. It is thus not easily portable, does not address the safety concerns raised above and serves mainly as a teaching tool to be added to a conventional bathroom.
There is thus a long-felt need in the art to provide a portable sink for use by children to get them to appreciate and learn personal hygiene and cleanliness without requiring a special pipe or drainage hookup and which may be portable and readily used remotely or in even the smallest of settings.